The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing pallets consisting of a load deck and feet or stringers and blocks supporting the deck, ads well as pallets manufactured according to said method.
Since the beginning of 1940 the importance of the pallet in materials handling has steadly increased. At present the consumption in the western world is about one pallet per capita per year. It is predicted that this will be doubled within a decade. In the USA, special rapidly growing forests have therefore been planted to ensure sufficient lumber for pallets. In Western Europe the consumption is about 300 million pallets per year, or about 15 million m.sup.3 of lumber, i.e. more than the total Swedish production of sawn timber products. On an average about 20% of the world's sawn timber production is used for pallets. Factory inspection laws and the like in some countries, requiring that manual handling of goods be restricted to items weighing less than 40 kg, about increase the use of palleted goods during transport. Lumber costs about $0.12 per kg, plastics $0.72 per kg, steel $0.24-$0.60 per kg and, although in a great steel producing country like Japan, a pallet can cost about $14.40, 90% of the pallets in Japan are still made from wood, which shows that wood is a very competitive material. It can therefore be expected that other materials will only replace wood in certain parts of a pallet. The European Pallet Union, in which the railroad companies in eighteen Western European countries are members, calls for a pallet structure according to a standard which has the code SIS 842007 in Sweden. This standard has previously specified materials exhaustively.
In later years, particularly at the Swedish Packing and Wrapping Research Institution, attempts have been made to change the standard to a functional standard, under which material other than wood may be used in building a pallet, providing that the material adequately fulfills the functional requirements of the standard in all respects.